Fantasy sport leagues are becoming widespread through the United States and the world. Fantasy sports allow sports fans to take an active role in professional or collegiate sports where the sports fans act as team owners to build a team that competes against other fantasy sport teams. The fantasy sport team owner creates their own roster of players by drafting players from actual professional or collegiate sports teams and use those players' real-life performance in professional or collegiate games to convert statistical performance into points. However, current fantasy sport leagues are organized and scored in such a manner that in order to be successful, the participant must be a real sports enthusiast with time to follow entire leagues of players and teams, rendering the fantasy sports leagues less accessible to moderate sports fans.
Fantasy sport leagues may be based upon a number of different sports, including, but not limited to: football, basketball, baseball, hockey, soccer, cricket, golf, auto racing, mixed martial arts, professional wrestling, boxing, billiards, bowling, chess, etc. The fantasy sport leagues can even further be based upon the different leagues or associations within a sport. For example, a fantasy football league may be based upon the National Football League or it may be based upon NCAA Collegiate football. Similarly, a fantasy basketball league may be based only on the National Basketball Association's (NBA) Eastern Conference or Western Conference. Some fantasy sport leagues may be even further limiting, and restrict fantasy sport leagues to only certain teams or even certain categories of players.
There currently exist many different scoring systems and corresponding fantasy points. Generally, fantasy points are based upon actual player or team performance in a particular game or event. Probably the most common scoring system converts statistical performance of real-life players or teams into fantasy points that are compiled and totaled according to a selected roster of the fantasy team. More complex variants may include computer modeling of actual games, but based upon selected fantasy roster, based on statistical input generated by real-life players or teams. However, different sports fantasy leagues often include different scoring systems that can make certain players or teams more or less valuable in one fantasy sports league as opposed to another different fantasy sports league.
One exemplary scoring system, head-to-head league scoring, is based on fantasy teams competing weekly to see which teams can compile the best statistics across a number of different scoring categories, with “wins” awarded based on the cumulative total for each scoring category used in the league for the week. Using basketball as an example, the league may be set up to use points scored, rebounds, assists, blocked shots, field goal percentage (FG %), free throw percentage (FT %), and 3 pointers made as scoring categories. If in a given week, a team has more assists than its opponents, the team would be credited with a “win” for that scoring category. However, if the opponent's team ended the week with more blocked shots, the team would be charged with a “loss” for that scoring category. If the two teams end up tied in a given category, each will receive credit for a “tie”. This weekly win-loss-tie total will be added to a cumulative season record, which can be used to determine final standings or playoff seeding. These standings will be based on your team's overall winning percentage, which is calculated by taking your win total and adding one-half of your tie total and dividing the sum by the total number of games your team has played. Unfortunately, this requires the fantasy sport league participant to draft and form teams based on their ability to produce in various scoring categories. This requires a deep knowledge of individual players and team; consequently, most sports fans merely root for their hometown teams, without the underlying knowledge of sports statistics.
Another exemplary scoring system, the fantasy point league scoring, is based on points being awarded on how well players perform in each of predetermined statistical scoring categories. All real-life statistics have associated point values, and each player's points are summed to produce daily totals. Using football as an example, the league may be set up to give a certain number of fantasy points for touchdowns scored, rushing yards, passing yards, receiving yards, field goals, etc. If in the league, a touchdown is worth six points, 10 rushing yards worth one point, and 10 receiving yards worth one point, a player with two touchdowns, 100 yards rushing, and 30 yards receiving would score 12 points for two touchdowns, 10 points for 100 rushing yards and 3 points for 30 receiving yards, which would total 25 fantasy points for that player. Fantasy points are only awarded to starting players on your fantasy team's roster. This scoring method may be used to determine a weekly, head-to head winner as is frequently used in fantasy football leagues. Alternatively, it may be used to keep a running total of fantasy points throughout the season as is commonly used in fantasy basketball, football, and baseball leagues. In these leagues, the team with the highest total of fantasy points at the end of the year is the league champion. This scoring system suffers from the same drawbacks as head-to-head league scoring, namely, that fantasy sports league participants require extensive knowledge of individual players' statistics and is further compounded with the fact that only players on the roster generate points. Fantasy sports league participants often need to change up their rosters in response to real-life player injuries or underperformance.
Many of these scoring drawbacks are evident in the fantasy sport team formation process, often referred to as the draft. The goal of the draft is to choose the players that the fantasy sport league participant believes will generate the most fantasy points. These participants choose real-life players based upon published statistics for that player and draft the player onto their fantasy team based upon availability and whatever other information they have gathered. Preparation for this draft process can be an incredibly time consuming effort, especially where the fantasy sport league's scoring system is complex. Additionally, the choice of players and their position within the roster can be a tedious process.
Another scoring drawback is the inability to weight particular plays, accomplishments, or successes. Each “win” or each accomplishment is awarded the same points (e.g. one point for each 20 yards of rushing). Existing fantasy sports scoring systems have attempted to address this by adjusting the accomplishment instead of the scoring itself (e.g. one point for 30 yards of rushing as opposed to one point for 20 yards of rushing). Furthermore, existing fantasy sports scoring are based on the total statistics for a player (e.g. the entire games total in a certain statistical area).
Although various scoring systems for fantasy sport leagues are known in the art, all of them suffer from one or more disadvantages. Therefore a need has arisen for a more automated and replicable scoring system which corrects the problems identified above.